you tell me you don’t believe in god

but I’m riding your content, your materiality,
I make my argument through receiving
what isn’t written. sweet morphology

let’s eat berries at dawn, slide in
through the window and sing
about each other’s hands, not touch

instead guess what future made us
so calloused at sunrise. besides,
blueberries stain your lips
so perfectly, I’d like to
become them—

not a blueberry but your lips, not to kiss
but because someone said mouths
already know what everything feels like.
therefore I must be a mouth

spitting seeds of aporia, fragile, full
of potential—lying. there is nothing

but structure and all the things it fails
to hold, the things that fall
from the tip of your tongue
into my body

are you, believing

Dairy Queen

I could^[1] take it all, love^[2] it big or small
Make it hit^[3] the wall, I’m^[4] the throat goat^[5]

— excerpted from“Throat Goat” by Kim Petras

^[1] milk a goat if you begged me to. these colostrum soaked sparkling fingertips have birthed
hundreds of bleating songs—I was a song once too, born hooved and peculiar and almost beautiful,
horns blaring

^[2] tastes sweeter covered in milk. or queerer—I know because when you kissed me goodbye I had blood
on my hands. A liquid might re-compose itself
from movement and creation myths have nothing
 on you. fucking

^[3] this queer dick, milk the infinitely transforming dregs as we’re wobbly-legged and stumbling
for life. I take it daily so hum me your hands, sing me what comes
the fastest, pray for pleasure because our mouths are our mouths
in vitro, spitting glitter against

^[4] square-eyed and stubborn as the rest
of them, fortifying identity
with mucous. this, inherently spiritual
release—we say anything
other than shame. we say

^[5] because time isn’t cyclical
for us anymore. rather, a slippery opening
to hum into. a throat.

—

Madeline Augusta Turner prefers to be covered in glitter. Madeline’s writing and work are centered around soil, love in the face of apocalypse, and place-based healing. Currently living in Fez, Morocco, her heart is always somewhere at the intersection of industrial decay and endless cornfields. Madeline has received a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, the Smith College Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Poetry, and a Fulbright fellowship. In 2022, she was a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop participant. Read more at madelineaugustaturner.com and say hello anytime on Twitter @soilslut.

Photography by: Ramez E. Nassif